Finding the Right House - Part X: The Inspection

With the contract signed, we had one week to get out of it and get our earnest money returned. So we hired a professional home inspector to inspect the house. We didn't know any home inspectors personally so we used the inspector Mary recommended (cough kickback cough) The earliest he was able to come was on Sunday, Nov 14th. His report would decide whether or not we were going to ultimately purchase this house.

I'm glad that it's customary that the buyers go along on the home inspection, because it's something I was GREATLY interested to tag along on.

We arrived at the house in the morning... I think it was 9am. Bill (the inspector) was already there but we had to wait a few minutes for Mary. When Mary finally arrived she knocked on the front door to learn that the Mrs. "Seller" and daughter were home. Mary expressed her disappointment that the sellers were home because it would hinder us being able to talk "privately". While we were upstairs the 2 of them kindly retreated to their family room downstairs to get out of our way... that was nice.

Bill was running around everyhwere with sensors and testing stuff. He tested every possible thing he could test.... he was running around so fast I just walked around looking at things. While we were talking to Mary, I asked her if she would asked Mrs. "Seller" if we could take some pictures of the house. I brought the camera in case they said yes. She gave us her approval... with that... I had a mission... to take as many pics as I couild because I knew that we wouldn't get inside the house again for 2 1/2 months! I took a good ninety something pics.

The inspection lasted a bit over 2 hours. Once Bill was done he sat at the kitchen table, pulled out a laptop & a printer and typed up a report. Once complete, he printed out the report right there in the dining room. The length of time this took makes me believe that he's got some sort of custom home inspection software and for a lot of the items I assume he was able to select options rather than type out everything... after all... the final report was almost 30 pages long!

In the report summary (2 pages) Bill noted the following issues...
* Sump Pump would not operate and needs replacing.
* Small Gas Leak at the pipe connection to the furnace.
* Kitchen Sink faucet leaks when turned on.
* No water comes out of the reverse osmosis filter faucet in the kitchen.
* Bottom right side of garage service door was rotted.

He gave us our copy of the report and from his laptop faxed a copy over to attorney's office. With that, we said our goodbyes to Bill and Mary and drove around the neighborhood a bit before heading home.

Back to Part IX --- On to Part XI